Off the Shelf: Joel Meyerowitz Shoots New York City Parks

After shuffling from one concrete place to another, most of us New Yorkers revel in rare moments spent barefoot on park grass, rejuvenating our sense of wonder for nature in the city. That relaxed satisfaction is the exact feeling with which Joel Meyerowitz imbues each photo in his latest collection, “Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks.” For the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s W.P.A. program, Meyerowitz undertook the massive task of documenting the city’s twenty-nine thousand acres of park land across all seasons. As explorers through this lush book, we follow more or less Meyerowitz’s actual route throughout the city, moving from the Bronx (where Meyerowitz grew up) to Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and finally Staten Island, stopping along the way to discover patches of natural splendor hidden within urban spaces: forests and meadows, marshes and shorelines. This visual narrative is interspersed with Meyerowitz’s stories from his childhood, or from the moments, just before he took a photograph, when he realized the magnificence of the scene before him. In one such instance, he writes,

I wasn’t supposed to photograph Central Park, so familiar are we with all its treasures, but I couldn’t help myself when now and then I pass through on my way home. One winter day as I ambled through the colonnade of Literary Walk, I was struck by how, when slightly shifting my point of view, I could either see the trees as classically ordered rows or as spacious forest. Pausing there, caught between the choice, I looked up and beheld the swirling arms of the trees raised to the heavens. And in that moment I understood how the motion of the planet, the movement of time and light, call out to and form the spiral shape that exists in every living thing.

In some photos, vegetation encompasses the whole of the frame, while others, such as the shot from underneath the George Washington Bridge (above), situate these slices of nature as inseparable elements of the urban landscape. Each image implores the viewer to breathe in the scents of the outdoors, relish in the sanctuary of these spaces, and reflect on the true underlying bloodline of New York City: the roots and rivers that came before the subway lines and skyscrapers. Meyerowitz’s photographs remind us how important is it to preserve them. Here’s a sample.